Month: September 2009
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Dukakis’s “no comment” rationale
Via Taegan Goddard, Michael Dukakis confuses reporters with this classic rationale for not commenting on a possible Senate appointment: “I’m not commenting,” he said. “Why not? ‘Cause I don’t want to comment.” It’s either a PR masterstroke (you answer the question while saying nothing), or a statement of his belief in free will.
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The spread of the two million protestor myth
Chris Orr beat me to the metaphor, but has there ever been a more absurd game of political Telephone than the way the two million protestors myth was created and propagated online? Eric Boehlert of Media Matters documents the carnage: The conservative comedy of errors began on Saturday when Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, took
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Jon Chait on vacuous Senate moderates
Jon Chait follows up on his brilliant TNR column on the vacuousness of Senate moderates with a blog post in which he impersonates a moderate trying to avoid taking a position on where to go to dinner: My wife: Do you want to go out to dinner? Me: I don’t think there’s enough of a
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Deborah Solomon is harsh, part 5
As I’ve noted before, Deborah Solomon, who does the “Questions for…” feature in the New York Times Magazine, is an incredibly harsh interviewer (sample question: “You strike me as deeply unanalyzed. Have you ever considered seeing a psychiatrist?”). But as a friend notes, her interview with “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane is especially nasty: SOLOMON:
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Interpreting “Who do you trust” polls
Though the public is closely divided on health care reform, Matthew Yglesias suggests an alternative interpretation in which “Obama is clearly winning” on the issue because of the zero sum nature of partisan politics. As evidence, he cites the public’s preference for Democrats on the “Who do you trust to do a better job handling
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NY Times omits Moore deceptions in doc story
A New York Times story today uses Michael Moore’s new documentary “Capitalism: A Love Story” as a news peg for a discussion of new report on ethical issues in documentary filmmaking: At an early screening for the media and the film industry on this opening weekend of the Toronto International Film Festival, a packed house
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Obama’s health numbers: Not moving much
Last week, I predicted that President Obama’s primetime speech to Congress would fail to have a significant effect on public opinion. While it’s too early to reach a definitive conclusion, the early indications are largely consistent with that conclusion. An ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted Sept. 10-12 shows no statistically significant change in Obama’s approval
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Crowdsourcing and the next Netflix Prize
An interesting development on the polling front: Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling is open-sourcing his polls. Yesterday he asked for suggestions on which state to poll next and posted a draft questionnaire for Joe Wilson’s district for comment. This approach, which I think is brilliant, raises a more general question: where’s the innovation in
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“You lie!” in comparative perspective
Like Matthew Yglesias, I’m more upset about Rep. Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” statement being false potentially misleading than about presidential heckling per se. And while Wilson’s outburst was relatively unusual in recent history, it’s important to remember that standards of political civility have changed. Consider, for instance, the famous caning of Senator Charles Sumner by
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Useless instant polls on Obama speech
Per Mark Blumenthal, all instant polls on reactions to Obama’s speech are scientifically useless — pay no attention to them. For instance, CNN touts its poll as showing a “Double-digit post-speech jump for Obama plan” but is forced to admit that “The audience for the speech appears to be more Democratic than the U.S. population